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Last weekend the news broke that Facebook was acquiring Instagram for $1 billion. Needless to say the tech news circles were buzzing with this announcement all week.

According to an article on TheNextWeb Twitter had also tried to acquire them, but failed.

And others suggest that Google may have been trying to acquire them ..

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With most social networks the users are the product.

In the case of Twitter one of the problems the company has been struggling with is how to actually make money from it all ..

So selling their content ie. their users’ tweets appears to be one of the solutions.

According to an article on RWW Twitter has sold the data to Datasift and has other companies lined up to buy the same data.

So not only is Twitter claiming ownership of the content, but they’re also happily ignoring any privacy concerns users might have..

Expect privacy advocates to get very vocal on this.

Related articles

• Privacy betrayed: Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive(globalfree.wordpress.com)

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• Time To Delete Tweets From Twitter – DataSift Will Now Sell Your Data From 2010 To Advertisers [Video](thetechnologycafe.com)

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• Twitter Is Selling Old Tweets(socialnetworkingwatch.com)

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• New Company Sells Years of Twitter Posts (escapistmagazine.com)
• Privacy betrayed: Twitter sells multi-billion tweet archive – RT (rt.com)
• Twitter apps are about to be flooded with ads (technolog.msnbc.msn.com)
• Twitter sells tweet archive to marketers (telegraph.co.uk)
• Twitter Selling Tweet Content Without Owning Copyrights!(wordsmithworks.org)

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• Privacy in a global village(restreaming.wordpress.com)

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• For Sale: Your Old Tweets(readwriteweb.com)

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No idea where it originated, so if you know the image source please let me know

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Image by Gustavo Pimenta via Flickr

CoTweet Standard, which is used by a lot of companies to manage Twitter for teams, is being withdrawn on February 15th

From then on CoTweet will only be offered as a paid service under a new name “SocialEngage”

There aren’t much details about SocialEngage on the CoTweet / Exact Target site unfortunately, nor is there any information on pricing. It looks like they’re adding support for tracking Facebook, but without knowing pricing etc., it’s really hard to see if this is going to end up costing companies a lot more than they’ll gain or not.

Their Enterprise product “Cotweet Enterprise” may have been very powerful, but it also came at a very high price.

So are there any viable alternatives?

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What does it do?

The basic plan, which is free, gathers a number of metrics related to your social media activities into an easy to use and quite visual dashboard.

With the paid plans you can also get information on your competitors, which is probably the more innovative aspect of the service.

If you’re looking for instant gratification then you’re going to be disappointed, as the service has to work within the limitations of Twitter and Facebook’s respective API limits.

Once its reports are ready they’re pretty impressive, as it gives you pretty much all the data in one place, which is handy. Other services that I’ve tried will give you part of the data but this does it all in one place.

Pretty nifty!

Related articles

• TwitSprout the New Twitter Analytic (thisismysoapbox.wordpress.com)

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Gowalla is to be shutdown.

After being acquired by Facebook the “also ran” to FourSquare will be shutting down early in 2012, according to Techcrunch.

So while Facebook may have acquired the skills and experience of the FourSquare team, they’re not taking over all the data.

So will Facebook use some of the technology to improve their own location based services? You’d have to assume that was the plan..

Guess we’ll find out ..

Related articles

• Facebook Acquires Gowalla (socialmediaexpert.ie)
• Facebook Confirms Acquisition of Gowalla (mashable.com)
• Gowalla confirms move to Facebook, service to shut down in January (engadget.com)
• Instagram gets a slice of Gowalla’s design staff in Tim Van Damme (thenextweb.com)
• Facebook buys Gowalla in assault on location-sharing market (guardian.co.uk)
• Why Facebook needs Gowalla (telegraph.co.uk)

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Facebook has acquired Gowalla according to reports.

Gowalla, which offers very similar functionality to FourSquare, never quite seemed to be as popular as its rival.

Facebook had been offering a location based service for its mobile users, but they were reportedly going to be phasing it out, but with the addition of Gowalla that will probably change ie. the current Facebook system will be supplanted by Gowalla’s technology.

The main page of Gowalla currently offers users the option to signup via Facebook, though it still maintains a signup feature for those that do not wish to succumb to Zuckerburg. Whether that will change or not is probably too early to tell

Related articles

• Report: Facebook Acquires Location App Gowalla (forbes.com)
• Facebook Buys Gowalla [REPORT] (mashable.com)
• Facebook To Acquire Location Service Gowalla? (viralblog.com)
• Facebook Buys Gowalla (gizmodo.com.au)
• Here’s how to delete your Gowalla account if you don’t want Facebook to have it (thenextweb.com)

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They want to restrict their followers to people over the age of 18!

Guinness Ireland's Twitter account trying to impose age restrictions

Of course I’m not “following” their account, but I can still see all their content!

And here’s the screenshot to prove it:

Guinness Ireland's "over 18 only" twitter account

I think the word I’m looking for is “fail”

They’ve posted a “clarification” of what they’re “trying” to do:

You won’t be blocked as such.You’ll be removed from our followers & you’ll need to verify age before u can follow us again

 

Seemingly this is similar to the laughable “age restrictions” that alcohol companies put on their websites.

It’s kind of sad really that they’d even try to do this on a social media network. So you can add alcohol companies to the list of those that simply don’t “get” the web..

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The first addition being rolled out to users is games, which are accessible via the subtle new button in the interface:

A new icon on the far right is for games in Google+

So what’s on offer?

On my own account I’m seeing a range of 16 games including a couple of titles from Zynga and of course “Angry Birds”:

Google plus range of browser based games

As soon as you click on a game to play it you get a fairly clear warning message telling you that the game is “social” and that your activity may be visible to others:

Google plus social games privacy warning

The next screen isn’t that different from the type of permissions dialogue you’d get on other social networks, though the wording is possibly a bit clearer (though I might be imagining that):

Google plus games permissions dialogue

So what will the next addition to Google+ be?

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If you are using Google+ you’ll probably have noticed that there are a very large number of animated gifs being shared.

Normal photos, images and videos are also being shared, but there seems, to me at least, to be a very large volume of animated gifs

So will Google+ result in an upswing in popularity for the image format?

Related articles

• How to Disable Animated GIFs in Chrome (chris.pirillo.com)
• Animated GIFs rule in 2011 (boingboing.net)
• Google Plus Vs Facebook: Battle of animated Gifs! (trak.in)
• Convert Youtube video to gif online (madrasgeek.com)
• Animated GIFs Triumphant (dashes.com)

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